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How to protect your company from data loss or breach?

Published: Sep 14th, 2017

In today’s digital world, one of the greatest challenges that most of the companies face is data breach or loss of data. We are all aware of the massive data attack in the US, the previous year leading to loss of almost three billion or more records.

When you think, that’s a thing of the past, to reiterate it here comes the news of Cex, Verizon and AA insurance companies dealing with data loss in 2017. This just goes to show that data loss is a serious ongoing problem and there needs to be stricter regulations and policies in place for data security and protection.

Hacks, attacks, ransoms or extortion attempts have caused almost millions of data breach or loss across the globe. At the same time, even if most companies are susceptible to data breach, it is also seen that health care industry is the most vulnerable to data loss, at least as per the Intel Security 2016 Data Protection Benchmark Study. Other industries targeted for data breach attack includes finance and manufacturing.

The main challenge to data breach is not only data loss from a company, but also that it would be sold or illegally used even before one could be aware of the possibility. To prevent this, one would need to be aware of not only the breach but would also need to identify the person behind it on how they are doing it etc. It is also seen that the gap between data breach and someone discovering it is also becoming wider, which makes the data prevention methods adopted as too little or too late.

Reasons for data breach:

We are all aware that most of the hackers use highly sophisticated technologies for their attacks. However, with top security professionals and secured data policies in place, one should be able to cope with it. In the meantime, we’ll try to find out some of the reasons behind data breach.

Competition to have the top security is the need of the hour, with more and more industries adopting digital methods to store data. However, the cyber security demands are not being met as required due to the lack of top security specialists to cater to all the rising demands.

Now, budget constraints are the issue for some companies. Adding to the woes of short supply of top security professionals to meet the rising cyber security demands, salaries for these people are also on the rise, which is not met by some of the companies, who thus lose out on a highly qualified cyber security expert.

You will also see that companies that use the outdated technologies for their systems are more prone to cyber-attack. If they do not update to the latest technologies, their vulnerability for data breach only increases, as the outdated systems are unable to withstand sophisticated tools or technologies adapted by cyber attackers to leak the data.

Ways to prevent data breach

Once you’ve identified the reasons for data breach, let’s take a look at some ways to put a stop to it:

Detect the sensitive data using server and employ endpoint technologies or data loss prevention products so as to classify data

Unapproved transfer or flow of sensitive data should not be allowed

Make use of data loss prevention products within the trusted network and at all the end points

Invest in providing security awareness training to the employees

Be up to date with the latest technology and software

Make use of the latest technologies and keep the security software updated

Devise a up to date encryption policy and follow through

Employ the intrusion detection and prevention method

Have regular inspection in place to prevent data breach

Have restrictions on unverified downloads

Key Takeaway: From above, we can thus conclude that though data is often vulnerable to attacks, by identifying the source and causes, one can prevent it by having viable and strict data security regulations in place. Meanwhile, when choosing an outsourcing partner for the data management projects also ensure that they employ the most updated and secure data protection policies, thus preventing further data leak or sabotage.